Closeup of a donated blanket.

These flashlights are among the donations collected for victims of superstorm Sandy. / TOM SPADER/STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER

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BRICK — With their arms elbow-deep into cardboard boxes, volunteers at a township school helped sort pallets of donations Monday for families displaced by superstorm Sandy.

Six of a total of 16 pallets of items lined the wall of a room in the Educational Enrichment Center on Hendrickson Avenue. The boxes held quilts, brightly colored blankets, toothbrushes, hygiene kits, flashlights and boxes of batteries.

Though weeks have passed since the storm destroyed homes along the New Jersey coast, many families in Ocean County remain displaced.

In Brick, 243 of the district’s 10,000 children are temporarily living in other towns throughout the state, and more of them are living some place in the township other than their homes, said Superintendent Walter Uszenski.

The donations “are the outcry and the outreach from so many big-hearted people,” Uszenski said.

The donations will go to families in Brick, Little Egg Harbor, Lavallette, Seaside Heights, Seaside Park and Point Pleasant areas devastated by the storm, said 46-year-old Nadine Demczyszyn of Jackson, who helped organize the supply drive.

Her initial plan was to collect items for emergency responders after hearing about first aid crews which were out of supplies and using paper towels as bandages.

“I have a line of officers in my family. She (Nadine) has always been around fire departments, EMS,” said Rich Demczyszyn, Nadine’s husband. “We wanted to help the people who are trying to help other people.”

When Nadine Demczyszyn issued her first call for supplies weeks ago over social media, the response was enormous.

“There’s one car (dropping off donations) in the driveway. There’s 10. They’re lined up down the street,” Nadine Demczyszyn recalled.

Soon, the couple and other volunteers were collecting for storm-displaced families as well.

Even donations of an ambulance — given from Bergen County Tri-Boro Volunteer Ambulance Corp. to Union Beach First Aid Squad — and donations of firefighting equipment from Chicago fire stations were distributed with the help of the volunteer network, Demczyszyn said.

Officials at the Bergen County Law & Public Safety Institute helped store the pallets until they were moved to the Brick school Monday, Demczyszyn said.

There, she and Susan Heschle, a physical therapist for the Brick schools, organized the sorting.

Heschle, 45, of Brick said children and teenagers in the district who are displaced or whose possessions were destroyed are longing for new items to consider their own.

Even the district’s preschool children could be feeling the effects, said Kathy DiGrigoli, the administrator at the Educational Enrichment Center.

“Our little children here (in the Education Enrichment Center) maybe aren’t verbal, but that doesn’t mean they haven’t been affected,” said DiGrigoli. “I think it (the storm) will affect everybody for a very long time.”